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OpenOffice Five Times As Popular As Google Docs

Posted by kdawson on from the still-small-potatoes dept.

CWmike writes "Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday. OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times." And reader Peter Toi informs us of the open source release of yet another office suite, Softmaker Office. Its claimed advantages are its compactness and speed (making it suitable for netbooks), its excellent MS Office filters, and the fact that it can be installed to USB flash drives.

4 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Say what you want about Apple by narcberry · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Sounds like an excellent way to distribute documents others can't/won't read.

    --
    Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
  2. Did they ask the right question? by blair1q · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    If they asked the question as "How much time do you spend using the following tools: a) OpenOffice.org, b) Google Docs, c) Microsoft Office, d) Pencil and Paper?"

    Then the answer is not that OO.o is more popular than GD, but that it takes 5 times as long to do the same job in OO.o, so people spend more time in it.

    In fact, I'm waiting for a CPU upgrade so OO.o can finish opening a Word document I clicked on yesterday...

    1. Re:Did they ask the right question? by blair1q · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      3.06 GHz quad-core Yorkfield.
      4 GB of 1333-MHz DDR-3 DRAM.
      You don't want to hear about my main-disk RAID-0 array.

      OO.o is a pig. Even if the quick-start daemon is running, it takes for-fucking-ever to open the first document, and all other operations in it feel clunky.

      Open-sourcers need to pay some attention to performance issues or they'll be marginalized by low-cost/free closed software.

  3. fris!t stop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    [samag.com] in the The goodwIll which don't use thE Despite the